Most large corporations implement contact centers, an arrangement whereby customers may call in with questions regarding accounts, complaints, or other issues. A typical example of such a contact center might be a credit card company, which maintains a plurality of agents at one or more locations to handle customer inquiries, account questions, etc. Recently, these call centers may be more generally referred to as contact centers, since the agent customer interaction may not be limited telephone calls. Rather, agent customer interaction may include items such as web chat, e-mail, or other forms of interaction between an agent and a customer.
FIG. 1 shows a conventional prior art legacy call center configuration. The arrangement includes a variety of distinct components that are usually patched together in order to provide the required services. The arrangement of FIG. 1 includes various reporting capabilities, different servers and gateways, and a variety of agents, all connected to a PBX. It also includes independent, disparate voice processing applications, such as voice mail and fax servers.
A variety of problems are present with respect to such prior art systems. First, the ability to grow the system is extremely limited. As more lines are required, more PBXs must be added. The PBXs must then be connected to all of the other PBXs. If four PBXs are to be used, for example, then each of the PBXs must be connected to three other PBXs. This creates a complicated system which cannot be efficiently or easily expanded. The switching capacity of each PBX is used up largely to connect to other PBXs rather than to perform switching of contacts for servicing.
Another problem with such legacy prior art systems is that of fault tolerance, if fault tolerance is even available at all. Specifically, a typical manner in which fault tolerance is implemented at such systems is to run a ghosting processor for every critical system. If a particular system element requires fault tolerance, then two of those elements must be run constantly, with one acting as a hot spare. This also causes a tremendous amount of excess cost to be introduced into the system.
Still another problem with prior art systems is that the switching capacity of the PBX is typically not enough to insure a non-blocking system. Specifically, in prior art systems, the main interface from the call center to the public switched telephone network (PSTN) is typically a PBX. The PBX is configured to have a switching capacity based upon the expected statistics regarding call volume and services requested. As a result, it is possible that an agent, voice mail, IVR or other system resource may be available, but a caller may nonetheless be blocked because the system has run out of switching capacity in order to connect the available resource to the caller. In such a situation, the caller is frustrated and the call center operator may lose business.
In view of the above, there exists a need in the art for a more flexible and expandable call center architecture.
There also exists a need in the art for a call center which can provide back-up of critical resources without having to recreate every resource twice.
There also exists a need in the art for a system which can be easily expanded by adding resources without having to reconfigure the entire system.